Disability Stereotypes: Impairment-Specific and Cross-Impairment Research with Implications for Interpersonal Judgments and Policy Decisions

When language and media portrayals consistently associate certain characteristics with disability while failing to link the group with leadership roles and other capabilities, cultural stereotypes can become engrained in memory, shaping what people notice and fail to notice about others. Novels, movies, and cartoons are full of stereotypical portrayals of disabled people as tragic victims, angry villains, and incompetent dupes. Even contemporary, award-winning films (e.g., Million Dollar Baby; Me Before You) reinforce stereotypes whenever the disabled character chooses to die so as not to be a burden to loved ones. A stereotype can be defined as a set of attributes stored in memory used to generalize about a group and its members. Although faulty and incomplete, stereotypes are not uniformly negative. They serve important functions that allow perceivers to go beyond what is directly observable, to predict how people are likely to behave. Most studies on disability stereotypes have focused on specific impairments as psychology has been slow to conceptualize disabled people as a minority group. Yet disabled people share many experiences with discrimination and restricted role opportunities that are frequently reflected in stereotypic beliefs about the group. This entry summarizes research on both impairment-specific and cross-impairment disability stereotypes and their impacts on perceptions, interpretations, individual behaviors, and policy decisions. Disability stereotypes can serve many useful functions. Stereotype contents also influence stereotype use, and when shared across many perceivers, these consequences can be far-reaching. Although stereotypes resist change, they can be altered if people are motivated to update their current understanding. Cultural stereotypes can also change over time in response to the changing social circumstances of groups. Much more scholarship is needed to examine how ableist stereotypes affect medical decision-making and policies governing the allocation of resources.